Reality is sometimes hard to digest: Many well-designed recruiting processes fail because there is no communication with the applicant. You want to invite your candidates to an online test? What will you do if they know nothing about this invitation and consider your mail, sent from your unknown test system, as spam? This is just one example of lacking candidate communication which can have devastating effects on your recruiting success. Providing a positive candidate experience is crucial to keep talents in the process.

To be honest, you should already be happy about a candidate applying at your company because it was their decision! A candidate is the one who makes the initial decision. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t know about them. So, they agree to follow your hiring process. Now it’s your turn: make sure you provide them with an easy and quick process by maintaining communication!

We have collected some of the best practices from our clients that could give you an idea of how to successfully communicate with your applicants. Do you have any practices you would like to share with us? Then please join the discussion and leave a comment.

What’s in it for the candidate?

Our customers use pre-recorded video interviews for different goals: to have standardised and faster hiring processes, to ensure fairness and quality standards in candidate pre-selection, to strengthen their employer brand. Whatever their goal may be: the important thing is to tell their candidates openly WHY they are using video interviews and WHAT BENEFIT it provides for the candidate. The sooner the applicants understand why you use a specific recruiting tool, the stronger their motivation will be to deal with it. Here are 3 examples :

Best Practice A: Let them be flexible

Context: Let’s look at a medium-sized company searching for interns for different departments – pre-recorded video interviewing helps them narrow down the field of qualified applicants out of several hundred applications and efficiently make hiring managers a part of the recruiting process.

Candidate communication: The company uses their career page to explain the entire recruiting process. Regarding the video interview, candidates are not only given tips for doing their interview successfully, but also information about the benefits of doing a video interview.

“Interviews 24/7” : A big advantage of this video interview is that you can easily do it at your convenience, according to your personal time preferences.”

Best Practice B: Incite your candidates to seize challengs!

Context: A multinational is looking for graduates for various trainee programs. To make their preselection more effective, they not only screen the candidates’ CVs, but also invite them to a video interview. (They won an HR excellence award for the effects that video interviewing had on diversity and quality of selection)

Candidate communication: Transparency is the big thing here. On their career page, the company provides information on every step of their hiring process, considering transparency as a key to a positive candidate experience. This is what they say about using pre-recorded video interviews:

“In your video interview, you have the opportunity of showing us your personality and individuality. You think this is a challenge? Very well, it is a challenge. Take your chance by filling your application with life. Inspire us with your video. We are looking forward to it!”

What is especially interesting here is the fact that the company is using the new und relatively unknown method of video interviewing to enhance candidate self-selection. Those who are willing to do their interview, show motivation and really want to work for that company, which means they are probably a better fit for the company than the others.

Best Practice C: Create personal value to the candidates

Context: The third best practice is about international recruitment. Another multinational is looking for international talent in the media industry. The most qualified candidates are invited to a big employer branding event in Berlin. Each year, there are several hundreds of applications from various countries worldwide. The selection process should be as quick as possible. Therefore, recruiters use CV screening and pre-recorded video interviews.

Candidate Communication: Why are we using video interviews? “You benefit greatly from the fact that we can get a more complete picture of you…. you can also get to know us better through our welcome video, which can give you a more personal picture of us as a company and as a department….”

In this best practice, the communication with the candidates is adapted to the particular circumstances: as none of the candidates will be able to have a live conversation with the recruiters before the event takes place, the company uploads welcome videos into the software to give a warm welcome to their candidates, make them feel comfortable, talk about their role within the company and about the position the candidates are applying for.